‘Shameful’ North Carolina GOP court ditches democracy precedent

Dissenting from the gerrymandering ruling, Justice Anita Earls made plain the partisan state of play on her court. “Today’s result was preordained on 8 November 2022, when two new members of this Court were elected to establish this Court’s conservative majority,” she wrote. Contrasting the previous curbs on partisan gerrymandering and Friday’s ruling allowing it, Earls explained:

To be clear, this is not a situation in which a Democrat-controlled Court preferred Democrat-leaning districts and a Republican-controlled Court now prefers Republican-leaning districts. Here, a Democratic-controlled Court carried out its sworn duty to uphold the state constitution’s guarantee of free elections, fair to all voters of both parties.

Concluding her dissent, joined by Justice Michael Morgan, Earls called out the majority’s “shameful manipulation of fundamental principles of our democracy and the rule of law.” She wrote that she looks forward “to the day when commitment to the constitutional principles of free elections and equal protection of the laws are upheld and the abuses committed by the majority are recognized for what they are, permanently relegating them to the annals of this Court’s darkest moments.

So the stakes in North Carolina are clear, with voters now less free to elect their leaders as they see fit. But what does Friday’s ruling have to do with a U.S. Supreme Court case? Earlier this term, the justices heard argument in a related case from North Carolina involving the so-called “independent state legislature” theory, the fringe GOP-backed idea that could give state legislatures across the country unfettered control over federal elections. When the North Carolina court took that rare step to rehear the gerrymandering case, the U.S. Supreme Court

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